New book! Dr. Smartphone: An Ethnography of Mobile Phone Repair Shops

Pleased to announce the publication of our book, Dr. Smartphones: an ethnography of mobile phone repair shops, at IDP, written by Anaïs Boch and myself. It’s the conclusion of the Mobile Repair Cultures project that we conducted between 2016 and 2019 at the Geneva University of Art and Design, funded by the Swiss National Research Fund. The book can be bought at IDP Publishing or found here as a free/open access pdf at this URL.

Here’s the book blurb:

“Dr. Smartphone,” “Mobile City Center,” “Docteur IT,” “iklinik,” “La clinique du téléphone cellulaire,” “Phonetime,” “iPhone clinique,” “Smartphone clinique,” “Phone services...” These are some of the names of a new type of business that has appeared in towns and villages in the past ten years: smartphone repair stores represent the most visible element of this ecosystem, but similar practices can be seen in hackerspaces, Fab labs, and temporary venues such as repair cafés. The services provided vary, but they tend to focus on the material elements of the hardware. Though the problem or issue is usually with the device’s hardware, repair technicians may also be able to address software issues; overseeing updates, changing settings, installing applications, or adding software and accessories not supported by manufacturers.

Drawing on a two-year field study in Geneva, Lausanne and Zurich, this book focuses on these independent repair stores and hackerspaces, and the practices of their technicians. How do these individuals come to end up fixing customers’ devices? How do they learn to handle products that were not designed to be repaired? And what can the mending of a cracked phone display tell us about skill, innovation, and the use of technology?

In this book, Nicolas Nova and Anaïs Bloch argue that a greater understanding of maintenance and repair is both timely and urgent, a fundamental part of any attempt to meet the challenges of an era of environmental crisis and consumer waste. An inquiry into “mobile repair cultures” presented through portraits of individual repairers, this book highlights users’ efforts to improve the sustainability of their technical objects.

At the intersection of anthropology, STS and design, this book is an investigation of smartphone repair places (shops mostly, some hackerspaces and repair cafés) in Switzerland. Designed by Raphaël Verona and Aude Meyer de Stadelhofen, we chose a format that mixes various kinds of material (photography, bande-dessinées, observations) for each repairers’ portrait, and a more standard academic text to introduce the approach and discuss the findings. The idea being that several kinds of readers may be interested in this: the research participants, designers and engineers involved in smartphone design, and, of course, scholars in social sciences or design research. It can be ordered on the publishers’ website at the following address.

Thanks Justin Pickard for his tremendous help on proofreading the manuscript. Laurence Allard, Jan Chipchase, Jérôme Denis, Matthieu Duperrex, Benjamin Gaulon, Fabien Girardin, Marie Goyon, Marc Laperrouza, Hervé Munz, Clément Renaud, Maria Roszkowska, Yvan Schulz, Bruce Sterling, Anne-Catherine Sutermeister, Jasmina Tešanović, Mathilde Bourrier and Dominique Cardon for their comments and support, as well as all our interlocutors and all the anonymous maintenance priests/priestness we ran across. Thanks Thierry Hausermann for being interested in publishing this odd document :)

Digital parlance #76

• Vampire appliances: appliances that use electricity even when they are off as these are often in standby mode such as a TV, a home assistant or anything with a timer. Smartphone and PC charger also use power even when they are not being charged, still plugged into the wall.

• Birchpunk : portmanteau word made of “birch” (birch tree) and “punk” (for cyberpunk) that designate a contemporary form of cyberpunk technological imaginary located in the countryside (Source: Birchpunk YouTube).

• Stacktivism: a term coined by Jay Springett “that attempts to give form to a critical conversation & line of enquiry (infra-spection?) around infrastructure & the relationship we have to it.” (Source: #stacktivism)

• Nonograms (aka Picross, Griddlers, Pic-a-Pix, Logimage) : picture logic puzzles in which cells in a grid must be colored or left blank according to numbers at the side of the grid to reveal a hidden picture. (Source: Come Internet with Me).

• “To Gloom” : “verb indicating deception in online teaching with Zoom where most, if not all, the participants are represented by a wall of black tiles with merely a name or a picture, not necessarily theirs. Situation generalised mostly following the coronavirus pandemic situation of 2020 when most courses were shifted online almost overnight not allowing for a proper redesigned pedagogy” (Source: via Jean-Henry Morin)

A lexicon of ‘buzzword ethnography

Preparing a class at Sciences Po Paris about how to conduct on-line ethnographic research, I ran across this fascinating notion of “a lexicon of ‘buzzword ethnography’ described by Crystal Abidin and Gabriele de Seta in their paper about digital ethnography and its discomforts:

“media anthropology (Coman & Rothenbuhler 2005; Postill 2009), media ethnography (Horst et al. 2012; Murphy 2011; Murphy & Kraidy 2003), cyber-ethnography (Hallett & Barber 2014; Keeley-Browne 2010), virtual anthropology (Reid 2012; Weber et al. 2011; Weber 2015; Wong 1998), virtual ethnography (Hine 2000), digital anthropology (Horst & Miller 2012), digital ethnography (Murthy 2008; Underberg & Zorn 2013), netnography (Kozinets 1997; 1998; 2002; 2006), social media ethnography (Postill & Pink 2012; Postill 2015), and networked anthropology (Collins & Durington 2014)”

Why blogging this? It’s interesting to understand these nuances and define my own perspective.

Anthropocene and Digital Imaginaries

The Post-Digital seminar at ENS in Paris organized this rather interesting conference in few weeks : Sans ordinateur / Without computer : Anthopocène et imaginaires numériques / Anthropocene and Digital Imaginaries. The call of paper can be found here and here are some excerpts that I find relevant to my own research:

Based on the hypothesis of a collapse of the IT infrastructure, and so, of a post-digital collapse, this symposium aims at suspending the occupation of the world. Given the omnipresence of computers, we want to provoke reflection to imagine what comes after. (…) Under- standing the roots of the mobilization of the world, of which the digital is a part, may mean not reproducing the causes of that which we want to escape in so-called “solutions” to the contemporary ecological crisis. This imaginary, the ambivalent source of the anthropocene, should be described. Our hypothesis is that it is at the crossroads of our science, mythical narratives and images of the world and technology (…) The interventions will aim at analysing the material and ideological impact of digital technologies on our environment and assess their future sustainability. They will also be able to question the use of digital in apocalyptic or innovation stories.

Why do I blog this? Addressing the role, the design and the use of digital technologies in the context of the current environmental crisis is a new interest in my research. Probably not that new considering that I started working on repair practices and the hybridization of low tech and high tech.